Note: This thread will contain spoilers!!
Rhino Healthcare Systems - an institution high in drama, low in seriousness, but all about curing what ails you. Three hospitals in, people are starting to like us. Or me, anyway. We’ve learned a bit more than the basics, and are now able to treat a number of maladies, in various rooms, and even teach our staff new skills. Our third hospital, the first in our line to offer teaching opportunities, was not so bad, and earned numerous awards. And so here we are, moving on to our fourth hospital.
We have the choice between two locations: Tumble, a sub-sub-alpine area featuring all manner of breaks and bruises, or Mitton University, where we can really lean into the research and teaching hospital arms of the industry.
Alas, being that I think research and teaching are boring, we’re going to opt to treat breaks and bruises.
Alright! Some new stuff to deal with, including cold temperatures, earthquakes, and for the first time, the fracture ward!
So, on our quest to achieve a three star hospital, we have a funny shaped starting building with not a heck of a lot of room. Branching out we’ll be taking over that parking area, the park, and eventually kicking that farmer out, because uh, farms don’t belong here. We have broken limbs to treat! Basic rating for a hospital in this area requires 50 treated patients with a cure rate of 60% or greater, and a thermal comfort rating of 60% or greater. Radiators, and cures. Here we go!
Alf Mastic, receptionist extraordinaire, with some good customer service skills, increased happiness, and motivation, mans our unnecessarily large (at this point anyway) reception desk, complete with flowers, printer, radio, two charity pots (one for charity, one for us, obviously), and some filing cabinets. Woohoo, we’re on our way. Time for some GP offices for the doctor’s to diagnose patients!
Dorothy Desert, our first Doctor! For now, she gets this office, though once the others are built, our doctors seem to lack a sense of care over where they work and will just take any old free office. So generous. Nonetheless, for now, Dorothy is going to be a GP, but as we build up the hospital, she’ll be taken off that duty and assigned to a more specific treatment room, due to her higher treatment skill. We’ll find a better doctors for the GPs offices as the talent pool fills up… for now, we build more GP offices, and start to fill out the hospital.
Man, building a hospital takes a while. Especially when you have to place all these posters and plants to make your room fancy so they like it more. Always the same posters, but hey, no one said these guys were intelligent! It all makes 'em happy. So what do we have? Another GP office, because, heck ya important… toilets, and a staff room. As we get patients diagnosed, we’ll make 'em wait a short while until the new rooms to treat them are built. Can’t be wasting money on things we don’t need, can we? Speaking of which, we’ve just hired Alexa Tiger, a level 2 maintenance janitor. Sweet!
Let’s get some patients rolling in… (ahem unpause)…
Woohoo, first patient. And by helicopter! Even jumped out under their own power… looks like a broken arm, but it’ll take our crack doctor (haha) to really tell.
Aha, a humerus injury! How terrible. Looks like we need to build fracture ward… well gents, one coming right up, let’s see here…
Well now, that’s a mighty fine looking fracture ward. We had to dismiss one of the nurse candidates because she had a nasty habit of making people want to vomit… and frankly I don’t need the extra fees in janitor wages. Too bad, she had good treatment skills. Instead we’ve settled with a ward manager nurse with a nasty temper when he doesn’t get his way. We’ll just have to make sure that doesn’t happen. You may have noticed my cash is taking a bit of a hit… well, running a hospital isn’t cheap, and neither are posters!
Now is where we start running into trouble… We’ll build this ward, but we’re going to have to slow down and start sending patients home until we make some cash soon, as these rooms are expensive, and so are the staff to run them. We’ll take out a loan as soon as we encounter something that pays, like lightheadedness or some clown problems… you’ll see! But for now, a regular ward!
A beautiful ward! Unfortunately, the nurse running it is eventually likely to be reassigned to a diagnostic room, but for now, it’ll do. We also don’t concern ourselves with petty issues like wall monitors being mounted across windows - that’s for hospitals with proper architects!
Woohoo, lack of building in March brought in $2000 profit! We’ll see how things go in April, but we may be able to build another room or two without worrying about jacking up the monthly expenses too much!
But wait… we’ve just accepted an urgent request to treat 6 patients with Portishead in 90 days… this will take another nurse at least, but we’ll see!
Excellent, 5 successful cures and 1 failure earns us a bump in reputation, some kudosh to unlock new items for the hospital, and $10K cold hard cash! We’re off to a good start… we’ve also added a pharmacy and we’re upgrading it’s equipment, the drug mixer, so it is more effective. Once that’s done, we’ll need a training room so we can start specializing our staff and making sure each room is operating at peak capacity… assuming we don’t run into too many unknown illnesses in the meantime, which will require more rooms to be built!
That’s all for now…
Player summary: This game is a ton of fun, although there is a fair bit of repetition at times. The varied level design in terms of hospital layout keeps it fresh so far, and I still have not unlocked all the rooms, as best I can tell. With more to come in terms of research and really learning how to train properly (ideally you recruit staff with no skills once the hospital is running and train them in only 1 thing so they are extra good at it, while cycling out your other employees), there’s still lots to learn here. The UI is reasonably friendly. Unfortunately a number of the items are entirely superfluous as a single type of something (eg. drinks machines) is better due to the way the AI chooses which machine to use… if you provide multiple options and it picks one that’s far away, the patient my die from poor health while heading to that machine and back to the room it was waiting for, even though another option was closer.
That said, I’m having a blast, and it’s definitely a good game. Glad I got it.
@fearlessfrog